


Battered But Unbroken

by SunlightOnTheWater



Series: Ruby and Sam [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, And really loves Sam, Between Seasons/Series, Demon Blood Addiction, Depression, Eating Disorders, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Insomnia, Isolation, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Ruby isn't working for Lilith, Sam Winchester and Mental Health Issues, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 19:34:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1790692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunlightOnTheWater/pseuds/SunlightOnTheWater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Over the four months Dean is in Hell, Ruby discovers Sam's hidden issues. Being a demon, she isn't quite sure what to do about them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battered But Unbroken

Sam's soul had been dulled by time. Any angel or demon that bothered to look closely at the shimmering silver mass beneath his human skin could see that it had taken numerous damages over time. What Ruby hadn't expected, after her very unexpected escape from Lilith's grasp, was that Sam would have shattered quite this much in such a short amount of time. At one point in time she'd possessed a psychiatrist, who had actually been surprisingly okay with the possession, and she remembered the symptoms of depression. Sam had fallen headlong into the pit of despair and it took two long weeks for her to pull him out again. That was only the beginning.

Sam had a thousand little quirks Ruby wasn't used to seeing in humans. Everything had to be just so. She'd heard of people having OCD but she'd never seen any of them quite like Sam. He took twenty minutes to pack his duffel and everything had to settle just right in order for him to be happy. She didn't think he had been this bad when Dean was alive but maybe he had just hidden it better. She waited patiently through it all, eventually deciding that she could live with this. In fact, after a week of traveling aimlessly from place to place, she started to learn Sam's system. His OCD made him a surprisingly efficient packer. He could make a mess into something complete organized in half an hour. He left nothing behind, not a trace that he had ever existed, and it made Ruby wonder if he had left any other kinds of traces behind.

A month into their business relationship, as she struggled to understand how she could convey the necessity of the demon blood to the destruction of Lilith, she finally bit the bullet. "I know you don't want to talk to me about this," she told him. "But is there someone else you could talk to?"

"There's no one else," Sam told her dully.

"You don't have to tell me who they are," she protested. "Just talk to them."

"No, you misunderstand me," Sam insisted without any real heat. "There is no one else." That stopped her in her tracks for a moment.

"Don't you have any friends?" she asked at last. Demons didn't have friends, Ruby knew that well, but humans did. Humans needed friends, needed companionship, like they needed air.

"No." Sam sounded almost wistful, eyes going distant. "I did once but..." He cut himself off and shrugged. "Someone told me once that this life, it isn't one you get to have friends in. He was right." Ruby knew by now that _Someone_ really meant _Dean_. She found the idea that Dean wouldn't let Sam have any friends, made Sam feel guilty for wanting friends, when he obviously had plenty made her furious but she knew better than to say it to Sam. One of his quirks was that nothing bad was to be said about Dean. It was practically the first commandment; Thou shall not slander the older brother. She let it go.

Sam also had issues with food. He would eat, but only pathetic looking salads. Ruby forced a hamburger and french fries on him one day only to hear him vomiting it all up an hour later. She didn't try it again. Instead she just reminded him to eat, over and over again, like a broken record. He didn't sleep either. Ruby stole sleeping pills and drugged him at least once a week. Another day he'd sob himself to sleep in her arms. The other five days he'd drift off during his work or not sleep at all. Once they started sleeping together, two months into their partnership, he started sleeping after the sex. He was down to four days with little to no sleep. That was as good as she could do.

The demon blood didn't help matters. It amplified whatever Sam was feeling, meaning that on the bad days his self-hatred overflowed. Ruby would listen for hours as he muttered his faults, prayed for forgiveness, prayed for redemption. She tried to convince him that he hadn't done anything wrong, that if anyone should take the blame for what they were doing it should be her, but he wouldn't believe her. About once every week it was a fairly good day and they ended up having sex after he drank her blood. It was during one of those times that she found the scars.

Her fingers carefully traced them on his wrists as they basked in the afterglow. Sam had been chatting, almost animatedly, because she'd found a scar on his hip, just a small one, that he'd got when one of his few friends from his middle school days had attempted to teach him to skateboard. He'd almost wilted though when she found the ones on his wrists. "What are these from?" she asked, being as gentle as she was capable of.

"Sometimes it made all the hurt, all the screaming inside, go away," he admitted softly. Ruby desperately wanted to flinch because she knew, intimately what could lead to a person doing such a thing. Most of the scars were slim and pale, easy to not notice in the light of day unless you got really close. One set though, was much deeper than the others. Her fingers caressed those, trying to erase the hurt. "I cut too deep," he said after a moment and Ruby didn't have to ask what he was talking about. "I didn't mean to but when I saw the blood I thought 'Why not?' I mean its not like I could do anything right anyways. I thought maybe it might be better-like the world might be a safer place-if I was just gone. But I couldn't." Ruby understood but she wasn't quite sure what to say so she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. She hoped that everything she felt could be conveyed through the kiss.

There were a lot of terms that could describe what Sam was. There were the people that talked about his character. They called him selfless, sweet, gentle, and heroic. Those things were important but they weren't quite true. Others talked about his hunting ability and called him competent and sometimes astounding but neither one was the word Ruby was searching for. There was a plethora of psychiatric terms for what Sam was as well; things like eating disorders and OCD, insomniac and depressed, but none of these were the sum of Sam. Ruby called him lots of things too. She called him sweetheart and baby and, on one memorable occasion, hun but those weren't who Sam really was. The word Ruby wanted, the one that summed up the Sam she was falling fast and hard for, was resilient. He was bent but not broken, bowed but undefeated, and she had decided she would hold him together for as long as it took for him to learn the feel all right.


End file.
